The king is old. The queen is young. Her face is fresh as May.
And there’s a lad, a laughing lad, so blithe and debonair,
The queen herself has chosen him, her silken train to bear.
How runs the tale, that good grave tale the peasant women tell?
“So both of them were put to death, for loving over well.”
There has been so much discussion over the so-called slow tempi of Bayreuth that it is time to shatter the little legend with stern facts. A well-known conductor who has presided at Bayreuth relates that when an old man Richard Wagner would occasionally take up the baton and conduct Parsifal or Tristan at a rehearsal. His admiration for his own music—an admiration that was starved during his exile—manifested itself in a tendency to dragging tempi. The venerable composer retarded each bar as if to squeeze from it the last lingering drop of sweetness. This trait was noticed and copied by the younger generation of conductors. The elder group, Richter, Levi, and Seidl had and have the true tradition. The later one simply means that Wagner’s pulse beat was older and slower. To slavishly imitate this is but a sign of the humor-breeding snobbery now so rife at Wahnfried. The music itself is the best refutation of such folly.
Wagner lets Love beckon Death to its side, and together Love and Death, inseparable companions from time’s infancy, close the drama, the king sadly gazing at the meeting of the great clear sky and sea, while Brangaene, near by, is bruised and bent with immitigable grief.
What a picture, what a tale, what music!
“The world will find a wholesome reaction in the study of music from its spiritual side, its inner life. In the laws of tonality the most musical and the least musical will have a common ground of interest. By study of tone, character, or mental effects, we are led to realize that the marvellous intuition of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle was correct, that music is the basis of all human development.” This, by an author unknown to me, is a prophecy of the track that music must take if it is to ascend. Intellectual music, music that does not appeal merely to the feverish nerves of this generation, is what we need; and by intellectual music I do not mean too complex or abstract music, abstract in the sense of lacking human interest. Is there no mean between the brawls and lusts of Mascagni’s peasant folk and the often abstruse delving of Brahms? Surely to think high means to hear plainly—or else Wordsworth is mistaken. We fret, fumble, and analyze too much in our arts. Why cannot we have the Athenian gladness and simplicity of Mozart, with the added richness of Richard Strauss? Must knowledge ever bring with it pain and weariness of life? Is there no fruit in this Armida garden that is without ashes? Why cannot we accept music without striving to extort from it metaphysical meanings? There is Mozart’s G minor symphony—in its sunny measures is sanity. To perdition with preachers and pedagogues! Open the casements of your soul; flood it with music, and sing with Shelley:—
Music when soft voices die